Rather than throwing up my hands and saying, “This is just the way I am”, I have come to see my brain as programmable.  This can be very useful in changing behaviors of various kinds – eliminating bad habits or creating good ones.  I feel like I am still in the beginning stages of understanding the potential of my brain’s programmability.  Here’s a good example: If you’re like me, you fall asleep in one particular position every night. Also, if you are like me, you assume that this particular position is somehow genetically wired into the core of your being. …

A story I came across this morning has been on my mind all day. It’s a sad little story about an older man working at a company where a new project required two normally isolated departments to work together. This man thought the project was a great idea and so he joked to a young co-worker from the other department, “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” If you are my age or older, you will immediately recognize this as a reference to the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercials from decades ago. In those ads, two people would collide…

Yesterday I posted these results from a study conducted by the Barna Group of 15,000 Americans, asking about their spiritual development. These people were asked where they would place themselves on the following spectrum: If we agree that the whole point of the Christian faith is to love God and to love others, then why are only 1% of respondents reporting that this is where they are in life? Where is the breakdown? In a sermon entitled Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity, John Wesley was tackling the same sort of question in his day: “What a mystery is this,…

In his book Social Holiness: The Company We Keep, author Jonathan Raymond cites a study conducted by the Barna Group a few years ago.  “Over a six-year period, fifteen thousand people were surveyed in search of their pitfalls and challenges in faith development. All of those surveyed were American citizens, a random sample not limited to Christians. The focus of the study was how Americans assessed their own faith development and progress.” (Raymond, page 29) “Barna calls these ‘stops’ because it is at these ten points that various groups appear to stop in their faith development and transformation.” (30) Here’s…

John doesn’t start his gospel the same way Matthew, Mark, and Luke start theirs.  John has no Christmas story. No shepherds watching over their flocks. No multitude of angels. No manger. No mention of Mary or Joseph. Instead John starts in a way that echoes Genesis 1. He writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” It seems to me that John wants the reader to focus on Jesus’s eternal divine nature. Any talk of Jesus’s birth might undercut that. But there is…

A friend put me on to sermon by Jason Craft, leader of a church called Messiah’s House. I don’t know anything about him or the church outside of this sermon, “Don’t limit God”.  Craft managed to reframe miracles for me, and it wasn’t even his main point.  He pointed out that while in the desert, the Israelites were dependent on miracles on a daily basis. Manna from heaven. Water from a rock.  It made sense … because they were in a stinking desert. But God intended them to be living in “a land flowing with milk and honey”. In other…

You never know what percentage of the people in the pews understand basic theology. And, sadly, sometimes the pastors’ understanding is suspect as well.  One Sunday morning years ago, Melissa and I were listening to a sermon from the lead pastor at a large church I was serving as youth pastor. From high up in the balcony, our view commanded the entire congregation. The text for the sermon was John 14:2 & 3, the words of Jesus to his disciples: “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going…

John Wesley was serious about small groups. But the small groups he created for the Methodists of 18th century England were nothing like what modern American Christians currently experience. The hardest of Wesley’s hard core groups was the “band meeting”. These were small, homogenous groups, and members were serious about defeating the power of sin in their lives.  Just to GET IN to one of these groups, you needed to truly desire to be free of sin. This was demonstrated by answering the following questions (among others) in the affirmative:  “Do you desire to be told of all your faults,…

When Philip first brings Nathaniel to meet the man he suspects is the long-awaited messiah, Jesus pays Nathaniel what has to be one of the greatest compliments of all time: “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.” (John 1:47) What an odd thing to say. Nathaniel responds, “Have we met before? How do you know me?” For us, living in an age of cell phones, surveillance cameras, and drones, it might be difficult to imagine why Nathaniel is so amazed by Jesus’s answer, but in his day, it was inexplicable: “I saw you under the fig…